Red Hat is over its moment in the Sun

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Once upon a time it was all so simple: Linux would take on and
destroy the Microsoft "evil empire" and liberate us all from
crippling software taxes.

However, the operating system's success has earned a new class
of corporate enemies - some of which once were friends to the open
source upstart. Sun Microsystems is undoubtedly more threatened by
open-source systems than perhaps any other major vendor and has
made clear its intention to give no quarter to leading enterprise
open source player Red Hat.

Last week, Red Hat's deputy general counsel, Mark Webbink, in
Sydney to deliver a seminar on open source licensing, said Red Hat
still "technically" had a contract with Sun to ship Red Hat
Enterprise Linux, but he expects it to expire.

"We have taken significant market share away from Sun and they
are having to deal with it," he said. "The industry isn't prepared
to pay premium dollars when open source is exceeding benchmarks at
a fraction of the cost.

"Sun haven't worked out their business model so they are just
screaming."

By "screaming", Webbink is referring to recent comments from Sun
Microsystems president and chief operating officer Jonathan
Schwartz, who recently passed through Australia evangelising the
company's recovery strategy.

Schwartz was unveiling a new licensing scheme, a subscriptions
model to Sun's Solaris operating system with the server provided
"free".

"We will use financing as a competitive weapon," he said.

While taking swipes at HP ("How can they win without their
operating system?"), and IBM ("On-demand is a tremendous marketing
campaign about delivering IBM consultants on demand."), Schwartz
continued his attack on Red Hat, saying at $1000 a server, it had a
"strange definition of free".

He also sowed some fear, uncertainty and doubt about ongoing
intellectual-property cases over Linux's code - disputes that have
threatened to engulf users.

"Who is going to stand up for indemnifying Red Hat's customers?"
he asked.

Webbink is somewhat wistful at Sun's stance, recalling the
contribution the company has made to the development of open
source, including opening the source code of Star Office to create
Open Office, the leading open-source desktop productivity
suite.

"Sun has contributed a lot to open source," Webbink says. "We
feel there are areas they just don't understand, like open sourcing
Java. They could have a much bigger piece of the pie by opening
Java. By not doing it they leave themselves vulnerable to
(Microsoft's) .NET.

"I don't think both can survive."

However, Sun has consistently resisted opening Java. In fact,
quite the reverse, Schwartz talks about monetising it. Again, a
subscriptions model features in the company's strategy.

Meanwhile, Webbink is keen to put ongoing legal action from the
likes of SCO in context, pointing out that such issues are
relatively common in the industry. He says the cases are generally
brought by "ankle biters", those that have "nothing to lose".

And the last words?

Schwartz: "This industry will get a lot more interesting before
it gets a lot more dull."